Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic

[Pages:33]COVID-19 Rapid Response Impact Initiative | White Paper 20

Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic:

Sites and Sources of Community Resilience

June 11, 2020

Jacob Fay1 Meira Levinson2 Allison Stevens3 Harry Brighouse4 Tatiana Geron5

Abstract

Along with the economy and health care system, schools are an essential third pillar in promoting community resilience and rebuilding communities' physical, economic, emotional, social, and cultural health in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Schools serve as sites and sources of community resilience in five distinct ways: they distribute social welfare services, promote human development, care for children, provide stable employment, and strengthen democratic solidarity. Yet long-term physical school closures--along with impending budget cuts driven by cratering state and local economies and tax revenues--make it extremely difficult for schools to perform any of these roles. We recommend three steps for restoring schools' capacities to support community resilience. First, state and district leaders should set metrics for achieving access and equity in each of the five roles that schools play, not just in academic achievement. Second, to establish these metrics, policymakers should develop or strengthen mechanisms to engage diverse community voices, as local community members often best understand the specific ways in which their own schools support or impede community resilience. Finally, Congress should allocate significant increases in federal funding to support public schools and districts for at least the next two years; these allocations should include strong supports for highneeds districts in particular.

To read more about educational ethics in a pandemic, see white paper 17, "Educational Ethics During a Pandemic," by Meira Levinson, .

1 Postdoctoral Fellow, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University 2 Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education 3 Ph.D. student, Harvard Graduate School of Education 4 Mildred Fish Harnack Professor of Philosophy and Carol Dickson Bascom Professor of the Humanities, University of Wisconsin--Madison

5 Ph.D. student, Harvard Graduate School of Education

The authors are grateful to Susanna Loeb for helpful conversation and to Marty West for incisive feedback.

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Table of Contents

01 Introduction

4

02 Social Welfare

6

03 Human Development

10

04 Child Care

13

05 Employment

15

06 Democratic Solidarity

17

07 Recommendations

20

08 References

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Schools during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Sites and Sources of Community

Introduction

Public schools6 are important institutions in virtually every community in the United States, from our most sparsely populated rural counties to our largest cities. They are places where children collectively grow up. They are key partners to families, providing predictable, reliable child care at an economy of scale and supporting children's development. They provide food and health services to children with limited access to each. They are sources of stable, middle-class employment for many adults. They are also sites of disaster relief, citizenship education, voting, town meetings, and celebratory moments of pomp and circumstance.

As we move forward to construct our "new normal" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we must therefore recognize that along with the economy and health care system, schools are an essential third pillar in promoting community resilience and rebuilding communities' physical, economic, emotional, social, and cultural health. Supporting schools amid the pandemic is thus about much more than reconfiguring learning opportunities, as crucial as that is. In fact, focusing solely on schools' capacities to provide high-quality remote learning opportunities to students at scale may perversely weaken communities by failing to recognize schools' diverse and far-reaching roles in promoting community resilience through non-teaching roles such as child care, social welfare services, and stable adult employment. Pandemic-resilient schools can (and are essential to) contribute to a pandemic-resilient society (Allen et al., 2020) when they are capable of fulfilling each of the five essential roles they have historically played in promoting pre-pandemic community resilience: social welfare services, human development, child care, employment, and democratic solidarity.

Yet the long-term closures that the pandemic requires have made it difficult, if not impossible, for

6 By public schools, we mean traditional public schools, public charter schools, Department of Defense schools, and tribal schools.



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Introduction

Schools during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Sites and Sources of Community

schools to perform any of these roles. The shift to remote education has laid bare deep educational inequities, as many students are not able even to access online schools or much-needed resources. With brick-and-mortar schools closed, parents across the country struggle to balance child care, educational instruction, and their jobs. And schools' role as employers--in many communities the single-largest local employer capable of providing middle-class or living wages--is facing the threat of severe budget cuts that may force them to lay off or furlough substantial portions of their workforces (Litvinov, 2020; Strauss, 2020). Even when schools have been able to sustain one of these crucial roles--namely, their ability to continue food distribution to students and families--cracks have become evident. Many eligible families have been unable to pick up food because of essential work schedules or lack of transportation (DeParle, 2020), and increasing numbers of Americans who are food insecure for the first time because of the pandemic-induced shutdown are reaching out to schools for support (Bauer, 2020). It is unclear whether schools have the resources to meet this growing need.

As the pandemic continues to shake the foundations of the country's economy and social fabric, schools need support along each of the five dimensions of community resilience so that they, in turn, can support the families and communities who rely on them in so many different and vital ways. In what follows, we detail each of these sources of resilience and the impact of the pandemic on schools' ability to realize them. We then offer a series of recommendations for policymakers that would enable schools to sustain communities during this moment of global crisis.



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Schools during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Sites and Sources of Community

Social Welfare

Despite U.S. education reformers' single-minded focus over the past thirty years on assessing schools' academic outcomes above all else, schools have always provided vital physical, mental, and emotional social welfare services to children and families. These important services enable the academic achievement by which schools are most often evaluated. They also frequently underpin the physical and economic health of communities made vulnerable by inadequate insurance, family instability, environmental toxicity, and jobs that fail to pay a living wage.

In 2016/17 (the most recent year for which complete data is available), for instance, public schools provided free or reduced-price meals to over 26 million students, or 52% of all school children (NCES, 2019a). Estimates for 2019 show that U.S. public schools served 3.6 billion free and reduced-price lunches; they also served over 140 million meals in the summer (USDA, 2020). Furthermore, many community partners, districts, schools, and individual educators supplement these federally funded programs to improve children's nutrition. After-school partners provide snacks and often dinner to hungry students; many schools send home backpacks on Friday afternoons with food to tide families over for the weekend; and countless teachers keep granola bars, apples, and other grab-and-go snacks in stock for students who need them.

K-12 schools also provide physical and mental health services to millions of students per year, includ-

ing vaccinations; management for chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma, or ADHD; sexual and

reproductive health education and services; vision, dental, and mental health screenings and services;

nutrition health education; and hypertension screening (Baltag et al., 2015). School nurses and coun-

selors are particularly powerful providers of care (Maughan, 2018); recent studies have found that

about three-quarters of students who receive any mental health services get them in their schools, for

instance, and that students are "21 times more likely to visit school-based health centers for mental



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Social Welfare

Schools during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Sites and Sources of Community

health services get them in their schools, for instance, and that students are "21 times more likely to visit school-based health centers for mental health than community mental health centers" (Whitaker et al., [2019]). Although the nationwide shortage of nurses has made it hard for schools, like community health centers and hospitals, to maintain adequate staffing levels (Washburn, 2019), U.S. schools still employ approximately 95,800 FTE nurses to serve a population of about 55 million students (Willgerodt, 2018). Vital health services are also provided by 111,000 school counselors, 32,000 social workers, and 41,000 school psychologists (as of 2012; see NCES, 2012). Often these providers are the first point of care, especially in under-resourced areas (Whitaker et al., [2019]); about a quarter of students served by a dental outreach program in Michigan, for example, had never seen a dentist before (Albanese, 2014), and over 6,500 students in Baltimore Public Schools have received glasses since 2016 thanks to school-based screenings (Hub Staff, 2019). Unfortunately, availability does not fully match need. The most vulnerable students often attend schools in districts with the worst ratio of counselors and nurses to students (Willgerodt et al., 2018; Gagnon & Mattingly, 2016; CLASP, 2015). This is one of the reasons teachers went on strike in Los Angeles Unified and Oakland, California, in 2018 and 2019; the unions made increased nursing capacity a key demand (Washburn, 2019) and won concessions in both cases.

Schools also act as hubs for a wide range of therapeutic and social services. In 2015, for instance, nearly 60,000 students received occupational therapy in the New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles public schools alone (Harris, 2015); schools also provide regular speech and physical therapy to children. Every day, educators identify and advocate for students who need evaluation or support by social services agencies. Students who are homeless, in foster care, or are experiencing significant life changes are often supported by school programs that support their well-being and stability (Belsha, 2020). Many schools also provide before- and after-school wrap-around services, including everything from music lessons to behavioral therapy, to offer flexibility for parents and enrichment for the students who attend.



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Social Welfare

Schools during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Sites and Sources of Community

The estimated 5,000 community schools in the United States go even further, providing health care, English as a Second Language classes, parenting classes, and housing and job supports to children's families and others throughout the community (Dryfoos et al., 2005; NCCS, 2020; Trujillo et al., 2014).

During the COVID 19 pandemic, schools' role as social welfare providers has been challenged by physical school closures. Students no longer have in-person access to the early intervention services, social workers, counselors, nurses, and numerous other resources that schools provide. Although special educators and occupational and speech therapists are trying to connect virtually with students (Mitchell, 2020), many students are losing valuable ground without in-person services and supports, and others awaiting services may not receive the diagnosis they need until schools reopen (Mader, 2020; Preston, 2020). Calls to child abuse hotlines have dwindled during COVID-19; experts believe that this drop in reporting is due to school closures rather than actual reductions, since school workers are distanced from their students and are less well-situated to detect abuse (Schmidt & Natanson, 2020; Stewart, 2020). Schools and districts have made herculean efforts to organize food distribution to children--and often to hungry adults as well, no questions asked (Levinson, 2020; Malkus & Christensen, 2020c). Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, has provided almost 5 million meals to adults and students while also providing nutritional assistance to thirteen temporary homeless shelters (Nittle, 2020). But meal access is still radically below normal levels, at a time when food insecurity is massively increasing due to cascading job losses. Only 15% of eligible children (4.4 million out of 30 million total) have received Pandemic-EBT electronic grocery cards set up by Congress's Families First Act--in many cases because states have to coordinate with individual school districts to get eligible students' names and addresses (DeParle, 2020), as they are the onl only governmental agencies that keep track of school children suffering hunger. The Census Bureau (Callen, 2020) and Brookings (Bauer, 2020) have similarly found that since pandemic-related shutdowns, nearly one-fifth to one-third of all families with children report food insecurity, and researchers Elizabeth Ananat and Anna Gassman-Pines have



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